Eight glass works from Sim Chi Yin’s Interventions series have been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum. This is a gift from Vivian Fung and Daniel Cheung to the museum.

Interventions is Sim’s reinterpretation of the British colonial archival photographs of the “Malayan Emergency” or the anti-colonial war in Malaya — present-day Malaysia and Singapore — a 12-year campaign against the Malayan Communist Party army between 1948 and 1960. Sim’s paternal grandfather was an anti-colonial educator and journalist in the Malayan war, and was eventually deported by the British to China in May 1949 where he was executed soon after. His being erased from his own family history is Sim’s point of departure in her now 15-year — and on-going — multi-chapter, multidisciplinary project.
 

Sim examined the entire collection on Malaya in Britain’s Imperial War Museum archives and made physical interventions in re-representing them, photographing the archival prints on a light table to create in-camera collages. The work makes transparent the various indexing numbers / systems, the colonial captions, revealing the indexicality of the colonial archive, questioning what makes an archive, who gets to decide how a war is represented and remembered. 

Interventions is also in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum and M+ Hong Kong.